A long-suppressed internal document from the Democratic National Committee landed like a grenade inside party headquarters Thursday, exposing a striking double standard at the heart of the Biden White House: extensive political resources flowed to then-First Lady Jill Biden, while Vice President Kamala Harris went years without a single poll conducted on her behalf.
The 192-page document, authored by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, was commissioned by the DNC to examine what went catastrophically wrong in November 2024.
Its conclusions are blunt, its revelations striking, and its release — after months of resistance from DNC Chair Ken Martin — has ignited a fresh firestorm inside a party still searching for answers.
Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, the White House asked the DNC to poll how First Lady Jill Biden could best help her husband politically. But it conducted no such research about Harris.
That lopsided investment meant that when President Joe Biden finally stepped back from the race in July 2024, his own vice president had no polling data, no tested messaging, and no research foundation to stand on as a presidential candidate.
Rivera called the failure to conduct that research a “massive missed opportunity,” noting that Harris was simultaneously being tasked with navigating difficult issues like immigration.
“As a result, at the moment of the candidate switch the polling team discovered there was no self-research on the Vice President to guide the development of the research instruments,” Rivera wrote. “An incumbent Vice President. With no research to share once she became the nominee.”
Three emergency polls were rushed into the field once Biden announced his exit — a frantic scramble to fill a pipeline that should have been built over years, not days.
Rivera stated the years lost were irreplaceable.
“Had the White House explored and evaluated ways to leverage Kamala Harris earlier in the administration, perhaps it would have improved the President’s standing, and it certainly could have helped prepare her to lead the ticket,” he wrote.
The autopsy also faults the Biden administration for failing to do more to boost Harris on immigration, particularly as the Trump campaign successfully branded her the administration’s “border czar.”
Republicans hammered that label throughout the campaign as the migrant crisis dominated voter concerns, and Democrats never mounted an effective rebuttal.
Rivera wrote that communication failures ran far deeper than one politically damaging nickname. “The national campaign did not effectively drive Trump’s negatives, and the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and a half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch,” he wrote.
The report further faults the “Bidenomics” branding strategy, concluding that tying the president’s name directly to his economic agenda backfired as Americans grew increasingly frustrated with the cost of groceries and daily essentials.
The report also highlighted what pollsters described as a “very effective” Trump campaign advertisement that left Harris without a strong counter-response.
The ad featured video of Harris expressing support for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for prison inmates, with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”
According to the report, pollsters believed Harris was completely boxed in — the footage was her own words, and the campaign had no effective answer.
The document warns that had Biden remained in the race following his widely panned June 2024 debate performance, Democrats could have faced even more severe down-ballot consequences.
Dial-testing conducted during that debate confirmed what many voters already suspected about the president’s condition.
Biden became the first sitting president to abandon a reelection campaign since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, leaving Harris approximately 107 days to build a national operation against a Trump campaign that was fully staffed, funded, and battle-tested.
Martin initially refused to release the report, then reversed course after mounting pressure from within the party.
He later acknowledged the decision to sit on the document had itself become a damaging distraction, creating a secondary crisis on top of the primary one the report was meant to address.
CNN published the report with DNC annotations disputing the accuracy of multiple claims.
The document is also missing key sections, including a conclusion, an executive summary, and “Notes for the reader.”
The intraparty blame game continues as Democrats struggle to reconcile what the report says happened with who, exactly, was responsible for letting it happen.
